The Da Vinci crock

Copyright issues have traditionally been not given the importance they deserve. That's have been the case even in the US, let alone in less developed countries. When I was in school in Russia I remember many professors who'd translate books from English to Russian and publish it as if they had written it themselves, under their own name. We as students would not mind it had the books been translated correctly.. but these "professors" did not even know English good enough!

Believe it or not, in British law publishing someone else's original copy work and claiming you have made it (known as plagiarism and completely different from copyright infringement) is a criminal offence. For the most part, the criminal law is only used for commercial copyright infringement with one exception, and an offence is committed when knowing or reasonably suspecting that the files are illegal copies, and without the permission of the copyright owner, a person:

makes unauthorised copies e.g. burning music files or films on to CD-Rs or DVD-Rs;

distributes, sells or hires out unauthorised copies of CDs, VCDs and DVDs;

on a larger scale, distributes unauthorised copies as a commercial enterprise on the internet;

possesses unauthorised copies with a view to distributing, selling or hiring these to other people;

while not dealing commercially, distributes unauthorised copies of software packages, books, music, games, and films on such a scale as to have a measurable impact on the copyright owner's business;

publishing someone else's original copy work and claiming you have made it

certain copyrights allow Archival copies of software to be made however these are not to be distributed.

The penalties for these "copyright infringement" offences depend on the seriousness of the offences:

before a magistrates' Court, the penalties for distributing unauthorised files are a maximum fine of £5,000 and/or six months imprisonment;

in the Crown Court, the penalties for distributing unauthorised files are an unlimited fine and/or up to 10 years imprisonment.

Also note §24 Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 which creates a range of offences relating to the distribution of any device, product or component which is primarily designed, produced, or adapted for the purpose of enabling or facilitating the circumvention of effective technological measures. When this is for non-commercial purposes, it requires there to be a measurable effect on the rights holder's business.

Plagiarism is indeed a thorny issue! I mean, to engage in the actual creative process to write a book requires a lot of mental energy and concentration. I have even read strange stuff, as to what might motivate a writer and incite his creative process.

Friedrich Schiller, the great 18th-century German writer, for instance, had to smell rotten apples for his inspiration to be stimulated. Schiller simply could not work without the smell of rotten apples. Professionals tried to offer an explanation for the phenomena - the fermented rotten apples probably sent a little alcohol to his nose, which could have played a role in inspiring and stimulating him to begin writing.

As early as August 1912, Jung had intimated a letter to Freud that he had an intuition that the essentially feminine-tones archaic wisdom of the Gnostics, symbolically called Sophia, was destined to re-enter modern Western culture by way of depth psychology. This takes us to the Gnostic text the Pistis Sophia. Pistis Sophia is an important Gnostic text. The five remaining copies, which scholars date c. 250­-300 AD, relate the Gnostic teachings of the transfigured Jesus to the assembled disciples (including his mother Mary, Mary Magdalene, and Martha), when the risen Christ had accomplished 11 years speaking with his disciples. In it the complex structures and hierarchies of heaven familiar in Gnostic teachings are revealed. The female divinity of gnosticism is Sophia, a being with many aspects and names. She is sometimes identified with the Holy Ghost itself but, according to her various capacities, is also the Universal Mother, the Mother of the Living or Resplendent Mother, the Power on High, She-of-the-left-hand (as opposed to Christ, understood as her husband and he of the Right Hand), as the Luxurious One, the Womb, the Virgin, the Wife of the Male, the Revealer of Perfect Mysteries, the Saint Columba of the Spirit, the Heavenly Mother, the Wandering One, or Elena (that is, Selene, the Moon). She was envisaged as the Psyche of the world and the female aspect of Logos.

Jung has been called weird by many because of his interest in the occult. Freud, for instance, would write to Jung in response to his letter:

Jung: "My evenings are taken up very largely with astrology. I make horoscopic calculations in order to find a clue to the core of psychological truth. Some remarkable things have turned up which will certainly appear incredible to you... I dare say that we shall one day discover in astrology a good deal of knowledge that has been intuitively projected into the heavens. For instance, it appears that the signs of the zodiac are character pictures, in other words libido symbols which depict the typical qualities of the libido at a given moment."

Freud: "In matters of occultism I have grown humble since the great lesson Ferenczi's experiences gave me. I promise to believe anything that can be made to look reasonable. I shall do so gladly, that you know. But my hubris has been shattered."

Yet, early on Freud himself dabbled in the Kabbala, the esoteric branch of Jewish mysticism. He belonged to a Jewish society called B'nai B'rith and enjoyed weekly games of taroc, a complicated and popular card game which some people think is based on Kabbala. The taroc deck varies in size, but it includes 22 trump cards from the tarot, which are rich in symbolic imagery. The symbolism on these cards may well have set Freud on the path towards his first ideas about the unconscious: it was at this time that he presented his first ideas about dream interpretation. This information has been largely suppresed, probably because it wasn't approved of in Freud's contemporary society, with its rising tide of fierce anti-semitism. Later Freud strongly disapproved in public of what he called 'the occult.'

By the way, in academic circles Freud was often seen as opinionated and rather peculiar so that much of his work was done in what he called 'splendid isolation,' just as it had been from boyhood. He obviously had outstanding intellect, but by his own admission, he had a rather neurotic, obsessive personality and could not imagine a life without work He wrote incessantly and much of his writing was done on his days off, or even after a busy day seeing his patients. Freud's obsessive personality meant that he was the kind of person who has to do everything meticulously and accurately and he liked to be in control. This can be seen in various ways outside of his work. He was very superstitious about certain numbers -- for instance, he became utterly convinced that he would die at 61 or 62, because of a series of rather tenous coincidencies to do with odd things like hotel room numbers. This kind of thinking is the down side of the type of self-controlled personality that is obsessional enough to produce the astonishing volume of work that Freud did. In extreme cases it can lead to what is known as an obsessional neurosis, where the sufferer is driven by endless compulsive rituals, and becomes unable to function normally.

Freud was a great collector of antiques, fired by his earlier classical studies and his interest in ancient history. He accumulated vast numbers of antique statuettes and other artefacts that are still in display in his study at 20 Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, London, which is now part of a Freud museum. They are crammed in all over the place, showing that he was not particularly interested in their artistic value, but more in the feeling of connection with the past that they gave him and the sheer pleasure of collecting them. His compulsive streak shows up again in the fact that he smoked cigars heavily nearly all his life and found it impossible to stop, even when he was diagnosed with oral cancer in 1923 and realized that tabacco was doing him no good. It was not until he had a heart attack in 1930 that he finally gave up.

Interesting, three_lotteries, did you find this information online or it's from some book?

Both Freud and Jung were rumored to be total weirdos ... too bad they infected the whole world with their crap!

[…] most famously of all, waiters who rush about. All of these, he says, are slaves to other people's perceptions - 'the Other'. They are exhibiting mauvaise foi -- 'bad faith'. […] It is here that the waiter comes in:

Quote

His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer. Finally there he returns, trying to imitate in his walk the inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton while carrying his tray with the recklessness of a tight-rope walker by putting it in a perpetually unstable, perpetually broken equilibrium which he perpetually re-establishes by a light movement of the hand and arm ("Being and Nothingness") [1943]

Café de Flore172 Boulevard Saint-Germain, 75006 Paris

Stop by Café de Flore to indulge in Camus' 'local' after he had a falling out with Sartre and Beauvoir. Popular also among the surrealists, existentialists and la bande à Prevert, apparently Johnny Depp hangs out here too.

Indeed, Ex, in a scene reminiscent of Rosie O'Donnell's days on "The View," hosts Elisabeth Hasselbeck and Whoopi Goldberg got into a heated exchange over the use of the "N" word on Thursday morning. [...]

Mrs. Hasselbeck is being paranoid I think.. I mean who'd @ # ! * i n g care that much as to create a fictitious character bearing her name to poke fun of her?! Who the @ # ! * does she think she is?!

Stupid, really - I mean, true, it's kind of creepy that the character of LnO who's raped and murdered appeared to bear a name similar to hers - but, still, you do not go on air and announce and complain about it!

As early as August 1912, Jung had intimated a letter to Freud that he had an intuition that the essentially feminine-tones archaic wisdom of the Gnostics, symbolically called Sophia, was destined to re-enter modern Western culture by way of depth psychology. This takes us to the Gnostic text the Pistis Sophia. Pistis Sophia is an important Gnostic text. The five remaining copies, which scholars date c. 250­-300 AD, relate the Gnostic teachings of the transfigured Jesus to the assembled disciples (including his mother Mary, Mary Magdalene, and Martha), when the risen Christ had accomplished 11 years speaking with his disciples. In it the complex structures and hierarchies of heaven familiar in Gnostic teachings are revealed. The female divinity of gnosticism is Sophia, a being with many aspects and names. She is sometimes identified with the Holy Ghost itself but, according to her various capacities, is also the Universal Mother, the Mother of the Living or Resplendent Mother, the Power on High, She-of-the-left-hand (as opposed to Christ, understood as her husband and he of the Right Hand), as the Luxurious One, the Womb, the Virgin, the Wife of the Male, the Revealer of Perfect Mysteries, the Saint Columba of the Spirit, the Heavenly Mother, the Wandering One, or Elena (that is, Selene, the Moon). She was envisaged as the Psyche of the world and the female aspect of Logos.

Jung has been called weird by many because of his interest in the occult. Freud, for instance, would write to Jung in response to his letter:

Jung: "My evenings are taken up very largely with astrology. I make horoscopic calculations in order to find a clue to the core of psychological truth. Some remarkable things have turned up which will certainly appear incredible to you... I dare say that we shall one day discover in astrology a good deal of knowledge that has been intuitively projected into the heavens. For instance, it appears that the signs of the zodiac are character pictures, in other words libido symbols which depict the typical qualities of the libido at a given moment."

Freud: "In matters of occultism I have grown humble since the great lesson Ferenczi's experiences gave me. I promise to believe anything that can be made to look reasonable. I shall do so gladly, that you know. But my hubris has been shattered."

Yet, early on Freud himself dabbled in the Kabbala, the esoteric branch of Jewish mysticism. He belonged to a Jewish society called B'nai B'rith and enjoyed weekly games of taroc, a complicated and popular card game which some people think is based on Kabbala. The taroc deck varies in size, but it includes 22 trump cards from the tarot, which are rich in symbolic imagery. The symbolism on these cards may well have set Freud on the path towards his first ideas about the unconscious: it was at this time that he presented his first ideas about dream interpretation. This information has been largely suppresed, probably because it wasn't approved of in Freud's contemporary society, with its rising tide of fierce anti-semitism. Later Freud strongly disapproved in public of what he called 'the occult.'

By the way, in academic circles Freud was often seen as opinionated and rather peculiar so that much of his work was done in what he called 'splendid isolation,' just as it had been from boyhood. He obviously had outstanding intellect, but by his own admission, he had a rather neurotic, obsessive personality and could not imagine a life without work He wrote incessantly and much of his writing was done on his days off, or even after a busy day seeing his patients. Freud's obsessive personality meant that he was the kind of person who has to do everything meticulously and accurately and he liked to be in control. This can be seen in various ways outside of his work. He was very superstitious about certain numbers -- for instance, he became utterly convinced that he would die at 61 or 62, because of a series of rather tenous coincidencies to do with odd things like hotel room numbers. This kind of thinking is the down side of the type of self-controlled personality that is obsessional enough to produce the astonishing volume of work that Freud did. In extreme cases it can lead to what is known as an obsessional neurosis, where the sufferer is driven by endless compulsive rituals, and becomes unable to function normally.

Freud was a great collector of antiques, fired by his earlier classical studies and his interest in ancient history. He accumulated vast numbers of antique statuettes and other artefacts that are still in display in his study at 20 Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, London, which is now part of a Freud museum. They are crammed in all over the place, showing that he was not particularly interested in their artistic value, but more in the feeling of connection with the past that they gave him and the sheer pleasure of collecting them. His compulsive streak shows up again in the fact that he smoked cigars heavily nearly all his life and found it impossible to stop, even when he was diagnosed with oral cancer in 1923 and realized that tabacco was doing him no good. It was not until he had a heart attack in 1930 that he finally gave up.

3 lotteries, Jung was totally nuts - and yet, I've read some stories about Freud that make me think he too might have been 50/50 when it comes to this thing.

After a verbose preamble, which among other things informs you helpfully that "behavior becomes unacceptable when it infringes on the rights of others," the Code of Conduct of the Public Library of the city where I live provides thirty-one examples of unacceptable conduct. These examples can be sorted into five general categories:

[...] How well does this theory apply to a typical piece of modern bureaucratic regulation? Or the types of behavior the library code prohibits, you might note that only those listed in the first category can be thought to convey useful information to any minimally socialized member of the community. There could be a real reason as to whether you're allowed to bring a bag of pretzels into the library, but do you really require "notice" that you can't snatch purses, expose yourself to patrons, do your laundry in the bathroom, or play high-stakes poker in the reference area? Suppose you hadn't been given notice of any of these things; does it follow you're free to claim as a defense insufficient publicity on the part of the state?

Can there be any non-psychotic person of minimally functional intelligence who would suppose that any of the things on this list, other than those dealt with in the most site-specific regulations, were not prohibited? [...] So here we seem to be faced with a wholly superfluous invocation of legal rules: rules that merely reflect tacit social understandings that themselves have no apparent need to be cast into a public legal text.

[...]

Posting a public notice of the unacceptability of theft, or of exhibitionism, or of physical and sexual abuse, is very much like passing yet another law providing still more penalties for the sale of already illegal drugs. Such actions represent our legal culture's equivalent to the practice of nailing garlic over doorways to repel vampires. In each case a psychological imperative born of a sense of lack of control, and of the fear and anxiety this sensation produces, demands of us that we "do something." Those same factors then lead us to do things that appear in the cold light of rational analysis to be almost wholly irrational.

Funny I read the other day a joke - it kinda illustrates what's talked about here:

Little Johnny is riding a bike to the street corner and he sees a cop riding a horse. The cop asks "Did Santa give you that bike?" and Johnny replies "Yes!" so the cop hands him over a ticket and says, "Here, next year, tell Santa to put lights on it!"

Johnny gets annoyed and asks "Did Santa give you that horse?" The cop plays along by telling him "Yes!" and Johnny tells him "Next year, tell him the d i c k goes under the horse, not on top of it!" and rides off on his bike.

Looks like the mods have a lil' bit of sense of humor left when leaving this thread open! Because all I can see here is threads being closed down!

I do not know in what sense you're saying this, but I take it as too much fuss on the part of legal scholars to formulate "theories" and the like, when in actuality things are settled in practice much easier. There is actually a book called "Wisdom of Crowds," exploring the apparent anomaly that crowds of non-experts seem to be collectively smarter than individual experts or even small groups of experts.

This basic insight is at the heart of contemporary financial investment theory, with its emphasis on the difficulty of outguessing the market. Beginning with British scientist Francis Galton's remarkable discovery in 1906 that a crowd of non-experts proved surprisingly competent at guessing the weight of an ox, financial columnist and author James Surowiecki skillfully recounts experiments, discoveries and anecdotes that demonstrate productive group thinking. The concept does not come as news to anyone reasonably well read in modern financial literature.

corec, I'm not sure that's the case - I am afraid we'd be putting the d i c k up the horse that way, just like the story of the little boy and the cop's Santa above.

After a verbose preamble, which among other things informs you helpfully that "behavior becomes unacceptable when it infringes on the rights of others," the Code of Conduct of the Public Library of the city where I live provides thirty-one examples of unacceptable conduct. These examples can be sorted into five general categories:

[...] How well does this theory apply to a typical piece of modern bureaucratic regulation? Or the types of behavior the library code prohibits, you might note that only those listed in the first category can be thought to convey useful information to any minimally socialized member of the community. There could be a real reason as to whether you're allowed to bring a bag of pretzels into the library, but do you really require "notice" that you can't snatch purses, expose yourself to patrons, do your laundry in the bathroom, or play high-stakes poker in the reference area? Suppose you hadn't been given notice of any of these things; does it follow you're free to claim as a defense insufficient publicity on the part of the state?

Can there be any non-psychotic person of minimally functional intelligence who would suppose that any of the things on this list, other than those dealt with in the most site-specific regulations, were not prohibited? [...] So here we seem to be faced with a wholly superfluous invocation of legal rules: rules that merely reflect tacit social understandings that themselves have no apparent need to be cast into a public legal text.

[...]

Posting a public notice of the unacceptability of theft, or of exhibitionism, or of physical and sexual abuse, is very much like passing yet another law providing still more penalties for the sale of already illegal drugs. Such actions represent our legal culture's equivalent to the practice of nailing garlic over doorways to repel vampires. In each case a psychological imperative born of a sense of lack of control, and of the fear and anxiety this sensation produces, demands of us that we "do something." Those same factors then lead us to do things that appear in the cold light of rational analysis to be almost wholly irrational.

Funny I read the other day a joke - it kinda illustrates what's talked about here:

Little Johnny is riding a bike to the street corner and he sees a cop riding a horse. The cop asks "Did Santa give you that bike?" and Johnny replies "Yes!" so the cop hands him over a ticket and says, "Here, next year, tell Santa to put lights on it!"

Johnny gets annoyed and asks "Did Santa give you that horse?" The cop plays along by telling him "Yes!" and Johnny tells him "Next year, tell him the d i c k goes under the horse, not on top of it!" and rides off on his bike.

Hahaha eli - you're so funny - I have read a slightly different version of the joke though - anyway!

The trouble with medicine in the modern Western world is that there is so little doctors can do. Miracle cures are as rare today as in biblical times. Most conditions presented to GPs in their surgeries are long-term, chronic complaints for which modern medicine offers no cure and not much in the way of treatment. Talk to any GP and you will hear a tale of frustration at the prospect of another packed surgery with patients who cannot be helped except with liberal doses of TLC (tender-loving-care), backed perhaps by a harmless prescription to make them feel their complaint is a genuine problem. It is difficult for doctors. They enter the profession with high expectations of healing the sick and curing disease, and they discover that reality is crueller. The major causes of ill health - diseases such as diphtheria, typhoid and polio - have long since been defeated by improved living conditions, vaccination and antibiotics. For modern ailments - failing hearts, stiffened joints, old age - there is little to offer.

[...] Dr. Mathew Lukwiya was at the opposite end of the spectrum. He was one of the top graduates of his generation at the University of Makerere in Kampala, but instead of emigrating to South Africa, like many of his colleagues, where a life of relative ease and wealth would have awaited him, he chose to put his talents to work where they mattered, in the war-torn province of northern Uganda where he was born. Why does a doctor make such a choice? There are many reasons, of course -- but one may be the prospect of making a real difference. To serve a population facing extreme privation and poverty after years of war is to know real power. The simplest remedies -- cheap antibiotics, basic surgery -- can have the most dramatic effects. A doctor there can save lives on a major scale.

Making a difference is what most doctors want to do but, in the West, find difficult to achieve. [...] Curing them is more difficult. Caring, not curing, is what medicine is mostly about. But for some doctors, discovering their powerlessness can be a source of unhappiness.

[...]

Doctors are taught that while death is the enemy, it is also natural and inevitable, and not necessarily evil per se. Death quite literally can't be stopped, so the goal instead is to minimize suffering and the amount of "needless" or "premature" death. For the overwhelming majority of nurses and physicians, death remains a nasty adversary. [...]

[...] You get accustomed to seeing some very bad stuff. Consider their ethics. They're quite real, but they are also very situational. They quite properly don't employ the same extreme measures to prolong the life of a terminal 95-year-old as they do when faced with a gravely ill child. When resources are limited, they try to get the most bang for the buck by focusing first on those who can be saved. This is the philosophical basis for triage, the standard emergency room and battlefield crisis practice of separating patients [...]

Mother here - my daughter just finished her IR (Internal Medicine) residency and was recently appointed at a nearby hospital. She comes home every day stressed-out, disappointed, appearing to be quite disillusioned with her career path. She mostly takes care of terminally-ill patients and says she receives no satisfaction from her work, in the meaning that her work made a difference - with a feeling a powerlessness and futility, that no matter what she does, her patients will soon die. She studied for 12 years medicine after graduating from high-school (that makes it 22 years of schooling, I guess) and feels now she just does not see the point of all that hard work, doing the kind of work she's doing.

Now I understand that many young/younger people may have this kind of attitude - but look at how beautifully the post I quoted puts it: medicine is more about caring, rather than curing. I am not saying that she does not understand that minimizing the suffering and the amount of "needless" or "premature" death does not really matter, it's just that she probably doesn't fully believes it, or not reflected enough on that.

Doing something, rather than paralyzed by the anxiety that very few times we can claim to be the "heroes" is what really matters, isn't it?!

"I want the moon," Camus' antihero Caligula reminds us incessantly. Well, emperors will be emperors, but your typical man on the street, upon unearthing such a desire from the depths of his own soul, might conclude that the goal is impractical and move on to something else!